Giant task

Rock opera puts to song an Oscar Wilde tale | Arsenio Orteza

Years before his deathbed acceptance into the Catholic Church, Oscar Wilde published "The Selfish Giant," a tale in which a giant learns the meaning of "suffer the little children" from a child who turns out to be Christ Himself. Now Jim and Dee Patton, who as members of the Agape Force wrote songs for the popular Christian children's albums Music Machine, Bullfrogs and Butterflies, and Nathaniel the Grublet, have turned Wilde's tale into a rock opera. "We have wanted to do this project since the 1970s," Dee told WORLD. "It was a challenge to do a kid's story but not a kid's album."

Or, to put it another way, how do you transform a 1,650-word story that reads light as air into a 29-song musical drama that plays out over 69 minutes? Credited to the Patton family band Bongo and the Point, The Selfish Giant solves part of the problem by keeping the songs short and by telling the story through the voices of a varied cast of characters (the Giant, Spring, Mr. Frost, Mrs. Snow, Hail, and others).